


Dean Winchester's Journal

by AKF_orever



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Basically Just Dean's Thoughts At the Beginning of Season Six, Canon Compliant, Dean Is Living With Lisa, Dean Misses His Old Life, Dean Winchester Actually Deals With Feelings, Dean Winchester Misses Castiel, Dean Winchester Misses Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester Uses Actual Words, Season Six Canon Divergent, but he doesn't like it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:21:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24192748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AKF_orever/pseuds/AKF_orever
Summary: Dean is living with Lisa and dealing with the emotional aftermath of losing his brother to the cage. He's got a lot of things to work out and Sam suggested that if he ever get pent up emotionally, that he write it down. Who is he to deny his dead brother's wishes?
Kudos: 6





	Dean Winchester's Journal

My name is Dean Winchester. I’m the son of John and Mary Winchester and the big brother of Sam Winchester (affectionately known as Sammy). This is my first journal entry and quite possibly my last but I guess that depends on whether keeping a journal is as therapeutic as Sammy said it would be. Dad used to keep a journal. It has snippets from Sam and I’s childhood but it was mostly about his hunts, the what is what and how to kill it kind of stuff. He never went anywhere without that thing so I figured journal keeping was worth a shot. There’s also the chance that even if this journal doesn’t help me, it could help whatever shmuck ends up reading it in the future. In that case... Dear Future Schmuck, I’m thirty-one years old and I have a lot of shit to say so buckle up because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.  


My life got flipped upside down when I was four years old and Azazel (the yellow-eyed demon) killed my mom in what appeared to be a house fire to anybody who wasn’t inside the house at the time. Sammy was only six months old and I carried him out of the house while Dad attempted to pull Mom from the flames. That was easily one of the most defining moments of my life. Dad was never the same after Mom died. I spent my entire childhood and adolescence on the road, eating fast food in the front seat of Dad’s 1967 Chevy Impala and sleeping on shitty mattresses in run-down hotels while Dad was off on hunts. Every one of Dad’s hunts was an attempt for more information on “Yellow Eyes”: who he was, what he was, where he was, and how to kill him. That was my dad’s life purpose: to kill the thing that killed his wife. Any time he didn’t spend on a hunt, he spent at the bottom of a liquor bottle.  


Dad made it painfully clear that while he was out on a hunt, it was my responsibility to take care of Sammy: feed Sammy, protect Sammy, make sure Sammy does his homework. I never resented my brother for being my responsibility but being responsible for him was one of the biggest challenges of my life. Dad rented out hotel rooms because he was fluent in credit card fraud but we hardly ever had any real money to live off of so I had to steal most of our food and I didn’t always get away with it. I didn’t consider myself to be a thief. I was simply a kid who was out of options and parents to rely on. It didn’t take long for thieving to just become a regular part of Sammy and I’s survival. If Dad found out that I left Sam alone in the motel or if Sam got injured on my watch, I would catch a fist to the ribs or a hand to the face. I could never tell Sam that though. Dad was the only parent Sam ever knew; I couldn’t tarnish his perception of the only parent he had left.  


It wasn’t long after Mom’s death, that Dad started training me to hunt. Exorcisms, salt circles, and shotguns were among the many things I was trained to use for Sam and I’s protection and when Sam was “old enough” to be at the motels alone, I went on hunts with Dad. I missed so much school while I was hunting with Dad that my grades were hardly worth the effort when I was there. Sam wasn’t like me though. He despised any involvement he had in our hunts and he spent all of his free time with his head buried in a book. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me or Dad when Sam announced that he was accepted into Stanford and he was planning on attending. That was probably the worst fight he ever had with Dad and the night Sam left for California was one of the worst of my entire life. I should have been proud of him but all I could think about was how he was abandoning his family and our mission to avenge Mom’s death.  


Sam was able to escape the life of a supernatural hunter for a few years but when the same demon that killed Mom killed his college girlfriend, Jess, he was encouraged to rejoin the hunt. It was two years after the death of Jess that we tracked down and killed Azazel and by then Dad had died in his effort to save my life. Ironically, that was Azazel’s fault too. You’d think that after we tracked what we had been hunting our whole lives, that we would seek out normalcy but leaving the hunter life is never that easy. Much like my father, I literally damned myself to Hell to save Sam’s life. On the bright side, it worked. On the not so bright side, Sam tried to find a way to keep me from being sent to Hell but he failed and I was sent to Hell anyway. I can’t say I really blame him. We were taught to prioritize each other above all else, regardless of whether or not that involved self-sacrifice.  


You’d think that being sent to Hell would be the end of my story, right? Wrong! I spent four months down there (which is about the equivalent to forty Hell years), until I was rescued by an angel of the Lord, Castiel. God commanded him to search the pits of Hell to rescue me. That was a lot to take in for me. I didn’t believe in God because I thought that if God existed, he wouldn’t have let my mother die in the way that she did. For that reason, God couldn’t exist, let alone could He exist and believe that I was worthy of being rescued from Hell by one of His angels (His plan wasn’t as benevolent as it sounds we’ll get back to that later).  
It turns out that the whole time I spent in Hell, Sam had developed a supernatural drug addiction to… wait for it… demon blood. Yeah, you read that right. Sam figured out that demon blood gave him super freaky super powers like killing demons with his mind. Obviously, he kept that a secret from me until I got myself in a jam and he had to rely on his powers to save my life. Frankly, I was pissed.  


Castiel hung around after I was rescued, just to keep an eye on us. He wasn’t too fond of Sam. Actually, that’s putting it lightly considering that once referred to him as “an abomination.” When the other hunters caught wind of Sammy’s little “addiction,” there was a target put on his head. I was expected to kill him like I would kill any other supernatural creature but I couldn’t do it. He wasn’t a monster; he was my brother. Being expected to kill my brother went against everything that I was but prior to this situation my motto with supernatural creatures was “shoot first, ask questions later” so I guess it made sense that the other hunters wanted him dead but it was still my job to keep him safe. I had to kill other hunters in order to protect the only family that I had left.  


Sammy and I were the last to know that his demon blood addiction was simply a component of a character arc in a Bible story. Sammy’s demon blood addiction and my return from Hell were crucial to the formation of the apocalypse. Before Sammy and I were born, God scripted us as the vessels for none other than the archangels: Michael and Lucifer. Michael was the obedient son while Lucifer was the rebellious son, a nearly perfect parallel to Sam and I’s relationship with Dad.  


The task was this: grant Lucifer and Michael permission to possess us so that they could battle it out on Earth like God commanded them to do. Michael was to kill Lucifer which meant I would have to kill Sam. It wouldn’t really be me and him but the end result would be the same. Sam/Lucifer would be dead if I did as God and his army of angels commanded of me. Again, I was being asked to do the one thing I knew I was incapable of doing. I had to choose between my brother and the future of humanity.  


The angels pulled out all the stops in order to persuade me to be a pawn in their game, some efforts more painful than others. I almost gave in to them too. If it weren’t for Castiel, who had somehow become a close friend of ours over the course of events, dissuaded me from allowing Michael to use me as a vessel. It was Castiel’s responsibility to rescue me from Hell and make sure I follow orders but over the course of a year and a half, he directly disobeyed his orders as he saw the fault in the order of Heaven.  
He reminded me that I was the one who taught him about free will. If I gave up after my best attempts to refuse Michael, then everything Cas had done in his rebellion against Heaven would have been for nothing. He would have rebelled for just an ordinarily weak human who wasn’t capable of standing up for what he believed in. Of course he said all of this while he had me pinned to a wall (in true angel fashion) but the words hurt most of all. That was all it took for me to strengthen back up and fight for “Team Free Will” instead of becoming a pawn in the God Squad.  
Sam found it harder to resist Lucifer. He saw no other way out than to do what was commanded of him. As it turns out, that was our best option. As long as Lucifer was inside of Sam, we could get rid of Lucifer once and for all and Sam was willing to give up his life to make that happen. My protective big brother instincts lead me in my attempts to talk him out of it. I couldn’t let him die even if dying was a choice he made for himself. Failing in my attempt to save Sammy, saved the lives of millions of people. Sam said yes to Lucifer and fell into the pits of Hell in order to save humanity. He died a hero and I couldn’t be prouder of him. Although, part of me still feels rotten for not trying harder to stop him.  


Before Sam died, I made him a promise. After he died, I would give up being a hunter and settle down into a comfortable “apple pie life” that he always thought I wanted. It was a life that was unheard of by anyone who was raised the way that we were. It was a dream, a fantasy. I gave him what he wanted though. I’m living with a woman who loves me and together we’re raising her son. It’s a respectable life for a man my age but… every day I feel something missing. I don’t just feel my brother’s absence; I feel a longing for a life that I once lived. I don’t actually fit into the life that I thought I wanted for myself. I wish that I could love my girlfriend the way that she deserves to be loved but this life will never fulfill me the way that my old life did.  
Now that you’re all caught up, I guess it’s time for final reflections. I’ll never know what kind of man I would have become if my mother hadn’t died. Surely, I wouldn’t have become a hunter and I’d like to think that my dad never would have laid a hand on me but I don’t know that for sure. Who I was when my mother died was an innocent child, completely unaware of the life before me. Who I would have become, under different circumstances, will never be.  


Who I am now is a man who loves his family above all else. I’ve lived for my family and I’ve died for my family and I’d do it all over again if I had to. I feel my brother’s absence in my life like a missing limb and with Castiel up in Heaven trying to restore peace, I’m feeling all alone in what others would consider to be a very full life. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be the man that I needed to be in order to survive and protect the things I cared about. Right now, I feel like I’m living someone else’s life. No matter where I am or who I’m with, I think I’ll always be a hunter on Team Free Will.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this as an assignment for graduate school which is why it's so strictly canon compliant and not Destiel heavy life usual. My professor didn't seem to understand it so I'm hoping it's better received here. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! I invite you to leave comments. Just please be civil.  
> If you wanna follow me on Twitter I'm @DecaSackW.


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